Reader warning: This fic isn't dark or anything, but it is porn with feelings and those feelings are far from cheery. Feel free to close if this isn't your cup of tea.
John yanked open the door of his therapist's house and found, with absolutely no surprise, Molly Hooper...and an ambulance. She, by contrast, seemed very surprised to see him.
"Um, h-hello," she stammered, "I'm sorry, Sh-Sherlock asked me to come-?"
"What, two weeks ago?" John asked with resignation.
"Yeah, about two weeks," Molly replied.
Exactly two weeks ago, Molly answered the door of her elegant, new, saved-up-for-her-ENTIRE-life Islington flat, to find a consulting detective standing on her mat and looking lost.
(The very first thing she had thought, Molly remembered a fortnight later, was "Oh my God, is he high?")
Sherlock was such a good liar, always, even with his body. But he was standing just a little too carefully straight, and his fair skin was just a little too pallid, the wild curls just a little bit... off. Molly was about to start interrogating him when from the living room Rosie interrupted with yet another nails-on-a-chalkboard wail of pain and she cringed, instead.
"Still with the teeth?" Sherlock asked.
"For about a thousand years now," Molly sighed.
"May I?" he asked, doing that thing with his hand on the small of Molly's back where it seemed like he was escorting her when he was actually getting her out of his way.
Rosie was sitting up on her blanket on the living room floor, waving a worthless ice-cold teething ring and sobbing disconsolately. Sherlock shrugged out of his overcoat, nodded to the baby in greeting, and said, "A moment, if you would, Watson, and I'll attend to you."
With that he stalked into Molly's kitchen and washed his hands thoroughly with soap and water. Coming back into the living room, he picked Rosie up and stuck the knuckle of his forefinger into her mouth. Rosie latched on with her little razor-sharp fangs and Sherlock flinched but didn't draw back. There was blessed quiet, and Molly exhaled a sigh of relief.
He wasn't high (he totally, totally was, she realized two weeks later). Because he loved Rosie more than he loved himself... well, no, that was wrong, the world was full of things Sherlock Holmes loved more than he loved himself. More than he loved John, or Mary, or anyone else in the world. He washed his hands before touching Rosie even when he wasn't allowing himself to be used as a dental anaesthetic. He'd certainly never let himself be around the baby when he was in an altered state.
(Dumb, dumb.)
"The texture of human flesh is much more satisfying than the ring, isn't it, Watson?" Sherlock murmured, gently bouncing Rosie in his arms, "I would wonder where you acquired this bloodlust except that I have met both your parents."
Mary, Molly remembered suddenly, had laughed, "I'm still very gung-ho about the whole baby-led weaning thing, always assuming Junior here can quit the cannibalism," just before she'd fled England, and-
Molly shook her head. Down that trail of thought lay the black dog.
"I was going to put on a pot of tea, and make a sandwich, if you wanted one?" she asked him.
"Just tea, thank you," Sherlock replied absently, looking down into Rosie's red, tear-stained face, "Case."
That was probably why he'd seemed off, Molly thought, (creating bullshit rationalizations because she was an idiot and watching him cuddling a baby had made her ovaries take charge of her brain). He was working. That was good for him. Sherlock always needed something to occupy his mind.
And her flat was blessedly quiet and the little anxious buzzsaws that a screaming baby always set off in Molly's mind were at peace, so she went and made a single turkey sandwich and two cups of tea, one with an absurd excess of sugar. When she came back, Rosie was hiccuping sadly into Sherlock's shirt as he sat on the couch, and he was able to unhook a hand and take the cup from her with a murmured, "Thank you, Molly."
They drank, accompanied only by the soft slobbery noises Rosie was making. All of their conversation seemed to have fallen out lately. Then the doorbell rang again, and Molly jumped up, remembering, and exclaimed, "Oh, God, that's John. Quick, give her here. Go hide in the bedroom."
Because she wasn't sure what would happen if John saw Sherlock, but she didn't believe it was anything good. Not after that letter. Not after, "I don't want him around my family. I can't keep you from seeing him, you're a grown woman and you can make your own bloody mistakes. But he's dangerous and he only cares about himself and I'm not having him near Rosie. He's done enough."
Molly hated having to watch the end of a deep and profound friendship, hated even more what it was doing to Sherlock. But she wasn't willing to choose between Sherlock or her goddaughter, so she'd taken up lying by omission to John. It came exactly as easily as it had done for the two years of Sherlock's 'death.'
Anyway Sherlock agreed with her, handed over Rosie and hurried silently into Molly's room, carrying his teacup and snatching up his coat as he went.
John looked like hell. That was how he always looked these days, exhausted and heartsick. Molly remembered that when she first met him, she'd thought he was blond. But upon seeing his baby, she'd looked closer and realized... he'd been dark, at one point. The lighter threads must have crept in later in his life.
Now he was completely grey.
John mustered a faint smile for Molly and a slightly more realistic one for Rosie. Then he let his daughter chomp down on his thumb, put her into her papoose and left with the absolute bare minimum of discussion possible, which was all that he could manage.
Sherlock didn't emerge from her bedroom when John had gone, so Molly went to go find him. He was asleep on top of the covers in her bed, curled up on his side, and there was a big wet spot on his beautiful blue shirt where Rosie had dribbled on him.
Poor thing,she thought, he must be working so hard to distract himself.
(Molly, you idiot,she thought, he was on the nod.)
She tugged the throw blanket from the end of the bed over him, went back to her half-eaten sandwich and the paper on pneumoconiosis that she'd been working on in a desultory way for three months. Sherlock didn't wake up. He didn't wake up when she switched the television on, he didn't wake up when she poured herself a nightly glass of white wine from the bottle in the fridge (just the one, thank you, Sherlock's dickheaded deduction had drawn her attention to the stealthy way her intake was increasing back in the Tom era).
He didn't even wake up when she crept back into her bedroom and changed into her pajamas. It was pretty much like changing in front of your cat, she rationalized, though Toby, being awake, actually showed some disinterested interest.
But when she reached around him to plug her mobile into its charger on her bedside table, Sherlock did wake up, grabbing hold of her wrist with the speed of a striking snake.
He was breathing hard, and his eyes were wide and dark (Stimulants as a class dilate the pupils and you certainly couldn't accuse Sherlock of not being willing to try anything in the drugs family once, so that's probably what thatwas) and she thought he was frightened, so Molly said soothingly, "Sherlock, it's only me."
"Yes," he agreed, struggling to a half-seated position, "It's Molly Hooper."
"Were you having a bad dream?" she asked.
Sherlock shook his head like a dog shaking off water.
"A strange one."
He hadn't let go of her wrist, Molly noticed. And right when she noticed that, he noticed it too, and gradually pulled her closer to him.
It was ever so gentle, Molly could easily have stopped him if she'd wanted. She didn't, though, and sat next to him on the bed. With his free hand, he brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. He was so close to her, she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face. And the brush of his lips on her jaw?
And, oh, God, Sherlock was kissing her and she was sitting dead still and not kissing back at all.
"Mol-ly Hooper," Sherlock murmured against her lips.
Really, she couldn't not kiss back, it would be bad form. Especially not with his enormous, warm hands slipping around her back and under her plain t-shirt and his mouth drinking hers like she was water and he was dying of thirst. But Molly did pullback for a moment and stammered-
(Stammered, again, the three bloody years of childhood speech therapy had worked and the only times she still stammered were when she was drunk or because of him.)
"Sh- Sherlock, w-w-what is-? You don't do this?"
"Yes but the things that I historically do really don't work any more, or hadn't you noticed?" he replied, wrenching away from Molly and staring straight in her eyes, "They've made me into a destructive force, an east wind tearing through the lives of everyone that I care about. Even you, Molly Hooper. I would have said you most of all, but now… Good God, I had no idea, but the skin on your back has exactly the texture of peau de soie silk. You really can't deduce that sort of thing."
(That wasn't true… the destructive bit, anyway, she wasn't sure about the silkiness of her skin. Molly remembered that she'd wanted to argue with Sherlock about him being one of the best men she'd ever met, remind him how he'd risked his life over and over again in the service of his friends because of his good heart… though now, two weeks later, she might have reevaluated her instinct to contradict him. But in the moment, with him nibbling on her actual earlobe, the best Molly had been able to come up with was:)
"Well, um-"
(Brilliant. Just bloody brilliant. Because right then was when she'd decided to ignore her doubts and go along with it.)
She'd wanted this for years. Really from the moment he'd walked into the lab at Barts and looked Molly up and down with those sharp pale eyes of his. She'd asked him out the flat second she'd got him alone and… and he'd totally missed it, dispatching her with a "black, two sugars, please, I'll be upstairs."
Just like that, every time, he'd always thrown Molly off her game. Every single time she'd decide to put him away into the "gay" or "asexual" or "indeterminate but not interested in my goodies, whatever" box he'd do something to drag her back in. A little bit of flirting in exchange for a favor. A compliment. A spiteful but accurate deduction to drive away another man she might be interested in.
(A blatant staring at her tits when he thought she couldn't see him, there had always been something there on Sherlock's part, she wasn't a total masochist, after all.)
(Hah.)
Molly couldn't have said when it changed to something deeper. Maybe when he'd looked at her with haunted eyes and said, "You," when she asked him what he needed. Maybe during those fleeting visits he'd made to her former flat (that's when he'd first started poaching her bed, she remembered) in the two years after his pseuicide.
Maybe when he'd kissed her cheek like she was something rare and precious and murmured, "I hope you'll be very happy, Molly Hooper." Certainly that was the exact moment she'd had the sinking realization that she was engaged to one man and terribly in love with another one.
So why not? Molly thought, letting Sherlock help her into straddling his lap, twining her fingers through his inky hair just like she'd always wanted to do, Everything's a mess anyway, we're finally in the place where we both want to do something with this at the same moment, it would be good to feel something good and really how can it make anything any worse?
(Moron, Molly thought, it can always get worse.)
He kept murmuring ('Cause, you know, he's chatty when he's high, Molly, you've seenhim like that.) in her ears, into the skin at the base of her throat… a continual stream of praise and chatter and… sensual Shakespeare quotes?
Or whatever, "Sweet lady-flower, I never brought/ Hither the least one thieving thought;/ But, taking those rare lips of yours/For some fresh, fragrant, luscious flowers," was.
There were depths to him Molly hadn't suspected.
And lengths… God, between her legs he was so tantalizingly hard, pressing into her softness. He was working to get her t-shirt off, so Molly reached down and helped him, and that, apparently, was what it took to shut Sherlock Holmes up for two seconds. His mouth actually dropped open.
"You're perfect, Molly," he murmured, eyes wide, "I always knew that you would be."
He dipped his head down and took her nipple between his lips and even as Molly wanted to scream with the electric sizzle of pleasure she thought, "Since when is there an 'always' for that?"
It didn't matter. (Yeah, it did.) There was just this haze of desire and wanting and the delicate skimming of his violinist's hands over her skin, tangling in her long hair. He mouthed over her collarbones and Molly decided Sherlock was wearing far too many clothes and started undoing the buttons on his shirt.
His cuff snagged on his wristwatch and he had to stop what he was doing to get his shirt the rest of the way off. In that commonplace, goofy moment, Molly looked at him, bare-chested before her. Kind of exactly what she would have expected: fair skinned, leanly muscled, a smattering of gingery hair, the same color as his beard when he let it grow out.
So many scars.
The bullet wound, the incision where they'd cut into him afterwards, she'd known about those. But the others… stabbed. Burnt. An inkvine thread curling over his shoulder that she would bet was the tail end of a whip mark on his back. And of course, the tiny, barely visible pinprick scars of his addiction dotting the pale skin of his inner arms.
(They were old marks, two weeks ago. The ones she saw later at John's therapist's were not, but apparently at this point he was still trying to hide what he was doing.)
Sherlock smiled up at her, a little shyly, once he had his shirt all the way off. Molly trailed her nails up his arms to his shoulders. She was rewarded with a muttered, "Christ," gooseflesh in her wake, and a vivid blush that started at his chest and began creeping upwards.
He was so beautiful like this, Molly thought, claiming Sherlock's mouth again. No matter what happened from this point, she wouldn't regret this, having seen him this way, so open and wanting and debauched.
(Or was it just that he was disinhibited because he was high? Did she regret it, now? Could she?)
(Huh, apparently not. Good to know.)
Molly rolled her hips over his straining erection and Sherlock moaned into the skin of her throat, which was wonderful. He was so vocal. It wasn't graceful, it wasn't elegant, it was just perfect. They struggled out of the rest of their clothes, and…
Nicely shaped, big enough to enjoy but not so big as to be intimidating. What her friend Meena used to call "college-boy cock."
Hello, sailor.
(Oh God, she really really hoped she hadn't said any of that out loud. She might have, though. It would be just like her to say that out loud.)
"Are you sure you want...?" Molly asked. Gasped, really, because his hands were doing unbelievable things to her breasts.
(She had done her bloody due diligence for this, bastard. She'd never have taken advantage of someone who wasn't rightfully able to consent if she'd had any real idea about it.)
"Very sure," Sherlock said curtly, "Really Molly, doesn't it look like I want this?"
It really did. That was a very sincere erection and (despite the snarky attitude) a heartbreakingly tender, hopeful expression on his face. Molly slipped a hand down between their bellies, wrapped her fingers around him. She gave two slow pumps, feeling the softness of the skin over the rigidity of the shaft, and rose up, and ever so slowly, took him inside her.
There was that old delightful stretch-verging-on-burn, as Sherlock rested his forehead on her shoulder and she sank down onto him.
This is right, Molly thought.
(This was a mistake, Molly thought.)
She was so perfectly filled, she almost didn't want to roll her hips. Almost. But she did. Sherlock gripped onto her hips and flung his head back into the pillows with a guttural moan. Molly was slow and gentle at first, letting the pressure build, ignoring the tight fingers on her hips trying to get her to pick up the pace.
"Molly…" Sherlock growled, and she relented. Leaning forward, Molly gripped the headboard, and let him drive into her as she rode him with all the vigor they could manage.
Minutes (Hours. Years.) later, Sherlock stammered, "Molly… Molly, please, I'm too close…" and Sherlock Holmes was begging her and that (plus his long fingers reaching down to where they were joined to rub against her clit) was it for her, and Molly flew, keening, over the edge. Sherlock pushed up into her a few more times, and with a murmured, "Ahh…" followed along with her.
Molly collapsed onto him, as he gently stroked her back and kissed her breasts. When the sweat began to cool on her skin, Molly pulled off of his softening cock-
(And, ha ha, that was a fun thought, she'd fucked an IV drug user without making him wear a condom, ha ha ha ha ha, enjoy six months of health anxiety and maybe consider some post-exposure prophylaxis, Molly, ha bleeding ha.)
-and curled up into his side. And Sherlock let her. He'd always been a cuddler.
"Sherlock," Molly whispered, although she didn't know what she was going to say after.
"Shh," he murmured into her hair, "We'll worry about it tomorrow."
And with the slow thud of his heartbeat under her palm, Molly slept… until some ambiguous time in the dark watches of the night when Sherlock roused again, enough to take her apart with his mouth and fingers before covering her and driving her into the mattress-
(Twice! Two unprotected encounters with an active needle user! It just kept on getting better and better!)
And then, inevitably, the morning after came. Molly woke up early, the chilly winter light creeping through the gauzy curtains. She'd sort of expected to be alone, but when she rolled over onto her side, Sherlock was next to her, face slack, cheek pressed into the pillow.
She noticed,where she hadn't before, that a few coarse white hairs were just beginning to creep through the dark curls at Sherlock's temples. Time had gone by, and she'd barely even noticed what she'd been missing. Softly, she reached her hand out and stroked above his ears. Sherlock wrinkled his forehead and blinked his bright blue eyes, waking up. For just a moment, he smiled, sweetly and goofily..
Then he woke up all the way, and his smile dropped off, and it all went to hell.
Sherlock scrambled out of her bed like it was on fire, and began rummaging frantically around on the floor for his clothes.
"Molly," he gasped, pulling his pants on, "I… I have to be going. Case. Very, very-"
He shook his head, and shrugged his blue shirt back on over his scars. From the pocket of his trousers, Sherlock pulled a small card with an address near John's house in Twickenham scrawled in his horrible handwriting.
"In two weeks… thirteen days, rather, the sixteenth… if you can come to this address at twelve thirty in the afternoon, and bring an ambulance-"
"Sherlock," Molly said, a growing sense of dread rising as she pulled the sheet up to cover her breasts, "Tell me that you didn't just do this because you need a favor from me."
"What, no, of course, I-"
Sherlock stopped dead, eyes unfocused, for a moment. Then he straightened up, and did up the fastenings of his trousers.
"Molly, this was- a mistake. A wonderful one, but a mistake."
As her heart broke quietly into a million glass shards, Sherlock finished off the buttons of his shirt, ran his hands through his wild bedhead hair.
"I didn't do it because I want a favor from you, I did it because I wanted to. But that doesn't change the fact that it was an error on my part. I'm not… I regret it. I'm sorry, Molly Hooper."
(She didn't cry. She was done crying over Sherlock Holmes. She'd just sat silently, watching him leave, until she'd noticed a heap of black wool on the chair and called out-)
"Wait, Sherlock, you forgot your-"
The front door closing cut off the word, "Coat."
Sherlock smirked at Molly, and chirped, "Just tell me when to cough."
He lurched past her, saying, "Hope you remembered my coat."
Molly stammered to John, "I- sorry, I didn't know you were going to be here. I've got no idea what's going on."
"Sherlock's using again," John said quietly.
"Oh, God," Molly said, the faint smile leaving her face, "Are- are you sure?"
Though John thought, after, that she seemed fairly sure, just on her own.
(Notes: I'm very sorry. If you hate me for this ending I will point out that this scene is alluded to but not depicted in "One Inch to the Right," which doesn't end on quite such a down note for these two chuckleheads. All I did to make this fic more general was increase the ambiguity on whether Mary is dead or not. The poem Sherlock quotes is NOT Shakespeare, but is Robert Herrick's "The Captiv'd Bee.")